Benchmarks of nouveau latest code

Nouveau developers don’t stop to amaze me. Really.
Not only did they manage to reverse engineer one of the most complex chips is the world, but
the performance recently improved quite a lot:
This is low-mid end mobile Geforce 8400M GS card running at 1280×800.

3D application

nvidia binary (FPS)

nouveau (FPS)

comments

compiz

220

300

nouveau beats blob here!

neverball

140

90

the 1st level of easy pack, few seconds into the game

nexuiz

160

80

in tutorial level, just as you start it. Overall, in real play it levels around 50FPS (nouveau)

etracer

120

50

Level: secret valleys, default if you just hit ok,ok,ok…

supertuxkart

100

30

level: race track

TORCS

80

17

default level on quick race

Alien arena

45

25

nouvaeu had blinking artifacts, cured by disabling compiz – game was full screen, default game level

Sauerbraten

45

20

Highest settings, the big valley level

So, nouveau is slower, but it is around 50%-30% of blob performance, and thats is actually better that other open source drivers!
And that with zero documentation!

And since today is special, that is really not a hoax, just ask nouveau developers.

Of course, to achieve these figures I set the card to the highest performance level (blob does that too) and used latest git versions of all nouveau components.

Well, you need to load the nouveau module with option perflvl_wr=7777
This is done on purpose because perf level switch isn’t stable, and so I must warn you too that it can destroy physically your card.
Then you choose perf levels like this:echo $LEVEL > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/performance_level
Or you can specify the level on boot using perflvl=$LEVEL module option in addition of course to perflvl_wr=7777
I suggest you to just join #nouveau irc channel on freenode and ask the developers.
They are quite friendly.

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